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What Comes After the Google Book Settlement?

Or: What You’ve Always Wanted to Know About the Google Book Settlement (but were afraid to ask)

In late March, Judge Denny Chin rejected the Google Book Settlement, one of the most far-ranging legal deals in recent memory with extensive ramifications for book publishing. The settlement, as originally proposed, is dead. As the parties involved, including the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, and Google, decide their next moves, many professionals want to know what comes now and how that will affect business down the line.

In this timely WEBcast, we’ll examine the concerns of all the parties in the publishing industry affected by the rejection of the Google Settlement: publishers, libraries, authors, and more. Among the issues our panelists will explain:

What’s happened so far? Attendees unfamiliar with the Google Book Settlement will hear a recap of the major players, the terms of the settlement, and why it was rejected.

What are the next steps? A status conference between the parties to the suit has been rescheduled for early June: what will happen there and what are the most likely outcomes?

What are the opportunities for the publishing business?

What new developments might come out of this latest decision that professionals working in publishing need to know about – a national Digital Library, Congressional action on copyright, a bolstered and independent Book Rights Registry, or something else entirely?

This WEBcast will benefit editors, marketers, rights professionals, librarians, authors, and anyone interested in the future of book publishing. Attendees who have been following the topic for years and those who exploring the Settlement for the first time will gain a expert insight into one of the most important topics for the future of the book publishing ecosystem.

Registration for this event is past due. If you are a member or for more information on how to become a member, you can find the recording in our webcast archives.

PANELISTS

Pamela Samuelson, Professor, Berkeley Law School & School of Information

Pamela Samuelson is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies are posing for public policy and traditional legal regimes. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment with the Berkeley Law School and the School of Information. She is the director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, serves on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and on advisory boards for the Public Knowledge, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Click here for a list of her writings on the Google Book Settlement.

James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School

James Grimmelmann is Associate Professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of LawMeme and a member of the Yale Law Journal. He studies how the law governing the creation and use of computer software affects individual freedom and the distribution of wealth and power in society. As a lawyer and technologist, he aims to help these two groups speak intelligibly to each other. He writes about intellectual property, virtual worlds, search engines, online privacy, and other topics in computer and Internet law.

Skott Klebe,Chief Architect, Copyright Clearance Center

Skott Klebe has worked in copyright and licensing technology for more than fifteen years. He was the architect of RightsLink, Copyright Clearance Center’s point-of-content licensing system, and is the inventor on several patents in the fields content and licensing.

MODERATOR

Andrew Albanese, Features Editor, Publishers Weekly

Andrew Richard Albanese is Features Editor, Publishers Weekly. He has covered the publishing and information technology field for more than a decade, and has written about the industry for numerous publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In October, 2008, he broke the news of an imminent settlement in the Google Books litigation, weeks before it was formally announced, and has covered the case and Google’s book program closely since. He is a regular speaker and moderator at industry events around the world.

The world has changed because of Google’s transgressions, and whether the settlement were approved or not, you can’t roll back the tape and see the world as it was before Google set up an assembly line of digital cameras and got to work. We live in the post-Google era now, where large-scale digitization projects are taken for granted and where the publishing industry has been restructured around the anticipation of a service that the absence of an approved settlement has left in limbo.

Congress, meanwhile, can resolve the problem of orphan books. In 2008, it almost passed a bill that would allow anybody to digitize orphan works without fear of being sued for copyright infringement as long as they proved that they had tried to find the rights’ holder. This would give all comers similar legal protection to that which Google got in its agreement. Congress should approve this legislation. While it’s at it, it should consider promoting a nonprofit digital library, perhaps seeded with public dollars. The idea of a universal library available to all is too good to let go.

With the Google project in legal limbo, Indiana University and the University of Illinois are moving forward with plans to set up a similar research center built around the archive maintained by the HathiTrust Digital Library, which was created by a consortium of universities, in part, to establish a stable backup of the books that Google digitized from their libraries. The new research center will initially focus on works that are no longer protected by copyright—roughly 2.3 million books in HathiTrust’s 8-million-plus collection.